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Red Dawn is a sensible film plot. You have two very powerful countries, arguably on the verge of war, so let's see what happens if they fight.

Except that to even a foreigner, a Hungarian, like myself sees that isn't what the movie is about if the trailer is any accurate indication. It's about playing into the US fantasy of having a revolution again like the one it was founded on, the one that textbooks tell children. A big, glorious people's revolution where the evil oppressor is thrown down, where the country is turned into an idealized paradise its people see in response to the ideology of the invaders, etc, etc.

Again, I'm basing this guess on the trailer, but LOOK at it: it doesn't show the US military fighting back, it doesn't show how one piece of super-costly cutting-edge technology pays offs against the enemy's slightly-less cutting-edge technology. It doesn't even have iconic military stuff, like jetfighters ridicolously dogfighting like its 1917 or navies firing at each other in a surprisingly-followable-from-the-sky naval battles or US missiles trying desperately to shoot down incoming Chinese ICBMs, or whatever goes on in modern military movies.

No, if the trailer is of any accurate indication, Red Dawn 2.0 is not about the interesting idea of "what if the PRC decides to fight the USA or vice versa". The trailer heavily implies that the USA simply handed over to the PRC (which fits into more and more into the "right-wing power fantasy" theory), and people are suddenly living in deep oppression from the Chinese. And for some reason, this is done completely, with every government employee 100% complying (I imagine the stereotypical American sheriff to be the LAST person to comply with an occupying power).

It isn't Chinese soldiers that tell the titular couple to wear a freedom-bracelet or whatever, it's white person dressed like local police (with big, stereotypical sheriff glasses). In fact, the soldiers dragging away the husband are clearly American soldiers.

The trailer clearly states that the biggest problem the resistance fighters are facing is that all modern computer technology is made in China and therefore designed to suddenly turn against you when the Chinese invade (which is ridiculous). The people depicted as the main, important people are clearly civilians fighting a war to free their nation and return it to its own ideology (as the "reboot the system" metaphor which is actually a trope of "revolution" fantasy: return the nation to its ideological purity). The idea that a citizen-resistance can win against a modern war machine is clearly ridiculous (as Hungarians experienced during 1956) to everyone but to Americans who grew up with a American Revolutionary War legend and its citizen-uprising fantasy.

So no, Red Dawn 2.0 does not appear to be at all a sensible film, but the same scaremongering, citizen-uprising fantasy mental-masturbation fest that the original had but blatant, more unlikely, more obviously propaganda and done far more cheaply.

Zixinus, you are a MASTER of summarizing my feelings on the topic.

Also I didn't realize it until now that your statement about what the movie is "really" about.

You are correct about the trailer.
If, IF, this was a movie about "America vs China" then there WOULD be "mighty armies vs armies" but there isn't...
What we get is EXACTLY what you described. America wanting to re-live the "glory days" of being the plucky freedom fighters against an cruel oppressor.

Which is something I do notice on the right Constantly... This almost fanatical obsession with the glorious American revolution, is a war they seem to have a hard on about Wanting to re-fight.

Zixinus wrote:The trailer clearly states that the biggest problem the resistance fighters are facing is that all modern computer technology is made in China and therefore designed to suddenly turn against you when the Chinese invade (which is ridiculous).

yeah when you consider that for this to happend, the companies that make modern computer technology which are predominantly western would either allow or be unable to detect this redesign, that this system never either trips early making people aware of it or fails to activate or that US military or goverment never tests it's computer hardware for things like that.

as probaganda piece this seems rather poor to me tbh it's far too glatant to convince anyone who doesn't already belive the message.

energiewende wrote:China is more powerful than Japan today; in the past it didn't allow that sort of thing, even giving them political concessions. Anyway, Japan is no USA, not some 'beacon of freedom', just forced to be like the US because of losing a war.

I'm just saying that it would be excessively easy to find America-haters in Russia and China. Perhaps easier than flipping a coin. A film how Chinese or Russians crush invading Yankee hordes would've been an instant box office hit. And yet it was never made.

energiewende wrote:I could take you more seriously if you were American rather than Russian. I'm not sure if you remember the USSR itself, but it rather stretches credulity you think the NSA is worse than what was going on there. More sophisticated, perhaps, but the real difference is that people who tried to tell tales on socialist internal security services did not live to do so.

Edward Snowden is pretty much the reverse story of a KGB defector - there's a worldwide manhunt and the only nation which accepted him and did not cow was Russia (and even there he was allowed to stay just for one year). And of course people who told tales on socialist internal security defected from their countries immediately. If Snowden did not do the same, he'd be in a cage with a bucket, cruelly degraded like Manning. Whoops.

energiewende wrote:Exactly, which was symptomatic of the fundemental errors in worldview that made USSR so weak. PRC isn't repeating them.

Um... symptomatic errors? The USSR never had a chance like the PRC - which was "opened up" precisely to draw a deeper wedge between two largest socialist powers. China exploited an existing contradiction between USSR/COMECON and USA/NATO - smart play, no doubt. But for the USSR there was no chance to exploit something like that. Perhaps the closest were the fractions in the West after the Suez crisis, then Italy potentially going red - something that would break the monolithic power blocs and introduce the ability to play against one fraction by allying with another.

energiewende wrote:Power word: racism.

Of course. The film is a piece of racist bullshit. The fact that you deny it only makes you an idiot.

energiewende wrote:Red Dawn is a sensible film plot.

About as sensible as an LSD trip, you mean.

energiewende wrote:Now substituting North Korea is absurd, but that shows something that America possibly doesn't want to admit: PRC has real influence over them, even now. Not just power to threaten nuclear annihilation, and receive the threat right back, but peaceful influence over the greatest institutions of their free market. That's something unprecedented in modern history. Whether it's malign remains to be seen, but PRC is now competing with the US on its own turf according to its own rules, and winning.

Yes right. It was absurd with China (whose entire strategy revolves around a limited nuclear deterrent and virtually nonexistent naval invasion capabilities), it gets completely batshit insane with North Korea. "Unprecedented in modern history"? Seriously? Come on. North Korea has replaced Russia on more than a handful of occasions (regardless of how pathetically stupid it was) in American films since the USSR collapsed and there was a thaw in Russian-American relations.

Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't the People's Republic of China more or less dependent on trade with USA to maintain it's current economy or at least it's growth rate, while USA take a nasty but recoverble hit on it's economy if it's lost trade with China.

Lord Revan wrote:Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't the People's Republic of China more or less dependent on trade with USA to maintain it's current economy or at least it's growth rate, while USA take a nasty but recoverble hit on it's economy if it's lost trade with China.

China has diversified. Its biggest trading partner for the last few years has been the EU rather than the US. However you are right in the sense that is trade suddenly cut off between the two countries, both of them will take a big hit.

Lord Revan wrote:Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't the People's Republic of China more or less dependent on trade with USA to maintain it's current economy or at least it's growth rate, while USA take a nasty but recoverble hit on it's economy if it's lost trade with China.

Well said. I first noticed this fallacy in Stephen Coonts' Hong Kong, which describes a former US Navy officer engineering the economic collapse of Hong Kong, with the goal of fomenting an independence movement there, and eventual regime change in China. The jackass seems to forget that, due to the amount of trade between the US and China, collapsing one nation's economy will automatically bring down the other's.

As for the US taking a hit, it will be recoverable, but the recovery will take time- you can't just wish away so major a trading partner, without finding yourself in need of a replacement of comparable purchasing power, just to maintain your own economy- and how does a politician expect his constituents to react, when they demand their standard-of-living be restored to previous levels, and his only response is "Be patient"? Cue regime change in Washington, as the jackasses who're blamed for allowing this blow to fall upon the US economy, are voted out of office.

My main point was that it's highly unlikely that china would do anything that could threaten it's US trade unless it had no other choice and unpaid loans are nowhere close to enough to do that.

No, more like industrial exports, of course. Not loans.